Rookies submission: Toadie Saves Fungoria

Concept Art Rookies Entry: Toadie Saves Fungoria

Hi there! My name is Tessa De Vletter, and below you’ll find some concept work I did as a project at the Academy of Digital arts. I hope you like and enjoy my work!

TOADIE SAVES FUNGORIA

In “Toadie Saves Fungoria,” dive into the visually impactful world of Fungoria, a 2D platformer where you guide Toadie, a plucky mushroom with a bioluminescent twist, on a heartwarming adventure to save their mushroom kingdom from the encroaching darkness of the Spore Eclipse. Solve Intricate puzzles, harness the power of light, and form bonds with quirky mushroom characters in a beautifully stylized world. Unearth the secrets of Lumina Grove and confront the malevolent Fungal Tyrant, Umbralon, in an epic showdown. Discover the magic of friendship, courage, and renewal as you restore color and light to Fungoria in this captivating and emotionally resonant two dimensional platformer.

Toadie saves Fungoria (TSF) is an original IP that I developed as a part of a project during my time as a student at the Academy of Digital Arts. It proved to be an interesting challenge, and I learned a lot, especially about environment design, in how to make illustrative environments that are both visually stimulating and interesting to the viewer, all the while only being contained to two dimensions. I really enjoyed doing the visual development and design explorations for this project, and am looking forward to developing it more in the future.

TSF Trailer:

As a quick introduction into the overall “feel” of this project, I’ve put together a mock “trailer” or sorts showcasing the concepts I put together. This was done using some simple parallaxing animation in Photoshop and then some video editing in Premiere Pro. 

TSF: The Design of Toadie:

“Toadie is the main character in the game. Toadie is very much a “small townie with a big heart,” type of character, who takes his assignment to save Fungoria seriously, even if he is a bit scared and apprehensive. Toadie has never ventures far outside of Glimmerglen and is curious to see what else Fungoria has to offer, and to find the hallowed, “Lumina Grove”

Designing Toadie was one of the most interesting and challenging parts of this project. As part of my pre-project research, I looked at games like Death's Door, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and Hollow Knight. In all of these pieces of media, they seemed to use a tried and true method of character design that seems to always work: make your character a cutesy/creature type being and keep the colour palette of the character extremely simple, one or two colors at most, and make them glow if you can.

As you can see below, I did experiment with giving Toadie more creature-like features, but found him to be much more relatable, and he got much more of a positive reaction when I gave him more human-like features, such as freckles and big, chubby hands. Other points of Toadie's character design that were done intentionally were the use of orange on his head, hands and feet. This is because, in platform video games especially, it is very important for the player's eyes to know where these parts of the character are at, at all times while they are traversing the environment. Since a lot of the environments in TSF are going to be cooler tones, I decided that having Toadie be very orange allows for maximum visibility.

TSF Level Concept: The Design of Glimmerglen

Glimmerglen is Toadie's home town, and where his adventure starts. When it came to designing this level, It was quite challenging to try and conceptualize an entire town while still being in two dimensions. It was an interesting exercise in layering elements, one that I feel caused a shift in my design thinking process, and that I would like to expand on. 

TSF Level Concept: The Forest Outside of Glimmerglen, The Redwoods

After being able to visit the Redwood national park in California as a child, I’ve always had a deep rooted love for just the enormity of them, and how much they would’ve seen. I wanted to capture that sense of wonder I felt, that pure history, the sense that something can be so much greater than oneself, and that one couldn't even comprehend the amount of time that has passed. Since this is also the first area that Toadie sees after he exits Glimmerglen, I wanted to convey a feeling of wonderment at the sheer size of the world outside his small town. 

TSF: Loading screen, Mock-up and Fungoria Map

It was really fun to configure this project into screen mock-ups and to put together a little loading screen using Glimmerglen as a backdrop. Furthermore, the map really helped in making the world feel a bit more alive. I drew inspiration from the map from Ori and the WIll of the Wisps.

TSF: Moodboard

Below I have attached a JPEG version of the Moodboard I used throughout the design process of Toadie Saves Fungoria.

I hope you enjoyed looking through my entry, and taking the time to hear about my little project!

Regards, Tessa